The battle for the future of the Open Web is taking place as a new document model merges into a platform for highly graphical, interactive and information rich applications. Open source communities vie with dominant vendors Adobe, Microsoft, Apple, Cisco, Nokia and Google to stake out their claims as open source innovations collide with standards consortia and proprietary alternatives.

Must read interview. Marc Andreessen explains his five big ideas, taking us from the beginning of the Web, into the Cloud and beyond. Great stuff!... (1) 1992 - Everyone Will Have the Web... (2) 1995 - The Browser will the Operating System... (3) 1999 - Web business will live in the Cloud... (4) 2004 - Everything will be Social... (5) 2009 - Software will Eat the Worldexcerpt:Technology is like water; it wants to find its level. So if you hook up your computer to a billion other computers, it just makes sense that a tremendous share of the resources you want to use—not only text or media but processing power too—will be located remotely. People tend to think of the web as a way to get information or perhaps as a place to carry out ecommerce. But really, the web is about accessing applications. Think of each website as an application, and every single click, every single interaction with that site, is an opportunity to be on the very latest version of that application. Once you start thinking in terms of networks, it just doesn’t make much sense to prefer local apps, with downloadable, installable code that needs to be constantly updated.

“We could have built a social element into Mosaic. But back then the Internet was all about anonymity.”Anderson: Assuming you have enough bandwidth.

Andreessen: That’s the very big if in this equation. If you have infinite network bandwidth, if you have an infinitely fast network, then this is what the technology wants. But we’re not yet in a world of infinite speed, so that’s why we have mobile apps and PC and Mac software on laptops and phones. That’s why there are still Xbox games on discs. That’s why everything isn’t in the cloud. But eventually the technology wants it all to be up there.

Anderson: Back in 1995, Netscape began pursuing this vision by enabling the browser to do more.

Andreessen: We knew that you would need some processing to stay on the computer, so we invented JavaScript. And then we also catalyzed Java, which enabled far more sophisticated applications in the network, by building support for Java into the browser. The basic idea, which remains in force today, is that you do some computation on the device, but you want the server application to be in control of that. And the whole process is completely invisible to the user.... The application model of the future is the web application model. The apps will live on the web. Mobile apps on platforms like iOS and Android are a temporary step along the way toward the full mobile web. Now, that temporary step may last for a very long time. Because the networks are still limited. But if you grant me the very big assumption that at some point we will have ubiquitous, high-speed wireless connectivity, then in time everything will end up back in the web model. Because the technology wants it to work that way...... LoudCloud was also called "Silicon Valley Power & Light". Tech companies could use LoudCloud as a utility for their applications. - a software power grid!... I have another theory that I call the missing campus puzzle. When you drive down highway 101 through Silicon Valley, you pass the Oracle campus and then the Google campus and then the Cisco campus. And some people think, wow, they’re so big. But what I think is, I’ve been driving for close to an hour—why haven’t I passed a hundred more campuses? Why is there all this open space?Anderson: What’s your answer?Andreessen: Think about what it has meant to build a primary technology company up until now. In order to harness a large enough market, to attract the right kind of technical talent, to pay them adequately, to grow the company to critical mass—until now that’s only been possible with companies that are providing tools for all sectors, not just specific sectors. Technology has been just a slice of the economy. We’ve been making the building blocks to get us to today, when technology is poised to remake the whole economy.Anderson: What categories are next?Andreessen: The next stops, I believe, are education, financial services, health care, and then ultimately government—the huge swaths of the economy that historically have not been addressable by technology, that haven’t been amenable to the entrance of Silicon Valley-style software companies. But increasingly I think they’re going to be.Anderson: Today, so much software is instantiated in hardware—Apple being a great example. As software “eats the world,” do you think that we’ll see fewer companies like Apple that deliver their revolutionary software in the form of shiny objects?So when we look at Lytro and we look at Jawbone, we see software expressed as hardware—highly specialized hardware that will be hard to clone...... When Milton Friedman was asked about this kind of thing, he said: Human wants and needs are infinite, and so there will always be new industries, there will always be new professions. This is the great sweep of economic history. When the vast majority of the workforce was in agriculture, it was impossible to imagine what all those people would do if they didn’t have agricultural jobs. Then a hundred years later the vast majority of the workforce was in industrial jobs, and we were similarly blind: It was impossible to imagine what workers would do without those jobs. Now the majority are in information jobs. If the computers get smart enough, then what? I’ll tell you: The then what is whatever we invent next.

Thursday, April 12, 2012

Very informative article. Kudos to Marbux. Explains how warrantless (illegal) surveillance by Government works, including the un-Constitutional strong arm tactics they use on Internet Service Providers to access your Web communications and activities. Marbux has it right about the Calyx Project; "Where do i sign up?"
Good read!
excerpt:
Nicholas Merrill is planning to revolutionize online privacy with a concept as simple as it is ingenious: a telecommunications provider designed from its inception to shield its customers from surveillance.
Merrill, 39, who previously ran a New York-based Internet provider, told CNET that he's raising funds to launch a national "non-profit telecommunications provider dedicated to privacy, using ubiquitous encryption" that will sell mobile phone service and, for as little as $20 a month, Internet connectivity.
The ISP would not merely employ every technological means at its disposal, including encryption and limited logging, to protect its customers. It would also -- and in practice this is likely more important -- challenge government surveillance demands of dubious legality or constitutionality.

The more i learn about the Governments illegal and un-Constitutional surveillance activities, the worse it gets. As i read this article i couldn't help but wonder why the Government would want to disclose the warrantless activities as evidence in court? Clearly the Government wants to have their violations of carefully enumerated Constitutional protections of individual rights validated by the nations courts. Scary stuff.
excerpt:
A recent court case provides a rare glimpse into how some federal agents deal with encryption: by breaking into a suspect's home or office, implanting keystroke-logging software, and spying on what happens from afar.
An agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration persuaded a federal judge to authorize him to sneak into an Escondido, Calif., office believed to be a front for manufacturing the drug MDMA, or Ecstasy. The DEA received permission to copy the hard drives' contents and inject a keystroke logger into the computers.
That was necessary, according to DEA Agent Greg Coffey, because the suspects were using PGP and the encrypted Web e-mail service Hushmail.com. Coffey asserted that the DEA needed "real-time and meaningful access" to "monitor the keystrokes" for PGP and Hushmail passphrases.
The aggressive surveillance techniques employed by the DEA were part of a case that resulted in a ruling on Friday (PDF) by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, which primarily dealt with Internet surveillance through a wiretap conducted on a PacBell (now AT&T) business DSL line used by the defendants.

Microwave transmission is used to link mobile towers back to a carrier’s network where it is physically difficult or economically unviable to run fibre to the tower.

Where current technology has an upper limit of a gigabit per second to multiple towers over backhaul, the government organisation said it could provide the 10 Gbps symmetric speeds over ranges of up to 50 kilometres.

The microwave backhaul project comes as second phase of CSIRO’s ‘Ngara’ project, which previously aimed to use radio spectrum freed up from the switch to digital television to provide residential fixed wireless broadband connections.

Friday, April 06, 2012

The prototype version Google showed off on Wednesday looked like a very polished and well-designed pair of wrap-around glasses with a clear display that sits above the eye. The glasses can stream information to the lenses and allow the wearer to send and receive messages through voice commands. There is also a built-in camera to record video and take pictures.

Sunday, April 01, 2012

Interesting chart describes the massive transition of small and medium sized businesses to the Cloud. Cloud based eMail and messaging leads the way. Top two reasons for the great transition? Cost reduction and productivity improvement.
Unfortunately this article fails to describe what this great transition to the Cloud means to legacy productivity systems - most of which are provided and provisioned by Microsoft. What happens to desktop and workgroup based business systems when the local data and transaction processing server systems are moved to the Cloud? How are desktop and workgroup systems re written or migrated?
Another factor missing from this article is any discussion of what happens to productivity when communications, content and collaborative computing are interoperably entwined throughout the application layer? We know that the legacy Windows productivity platform seriously lacked communications capabilities. This fact greatly reduced expected productivity gains.
excerpt:
Microsoft commissioned the study of 3,000 small and medium sized businesses in 13 countries. The survey was conducted by Wayland, Mass.-based research firm Edge Strategies.
The most commonly used cloud services are email, instant messaging, voice communications, and backup. Edge also looked at SMB cloud plans over the next three years and the same cloud services also are in the IT plans of those embracing the cloud.
From this data, it certainly could be argued that SMBs seem to be quick to embrace the cloud in order to enhance communication. It makes sense: in small business, communication is key to ensure rapid growth.
The biggest motivators for migration to the cloud among SMBs is to save money (54 percent), followed by increases in productivity. Decision makers also mentioned flexibility as a fairly common response. Of those already using the cloud, 59 percent reported productivity increases as a result.
SMB cloud adoption begins to acclerate, study finds
http://betanews.com/2012/04/01/smb-cloud-adoption-begins-to-acclerate-study-finds/